Remembering Robin Williams: A Performer Who Was Kind Even to His Critics

Self-extinction is the most drastic form of self-assertion. Committing suicide leaves everyone who's been abruptly left behind stuck meeting the implied demand to reassess the significance of the life that led up to it, and the finale's unwelcomely stark light is usually accusatory in the bargain. So where should this particular reckoning begin? With the obvious caveat that the Marin County Sheriff's early verdict on Robin Williams' death yesterday at age 63 may not be the final word, that's where.

Right, right—there's a lot we don't know yet, as usual. No doubt, a truckload of previously unpublicized mitigating factors providing sobering inside dish on why he killed himself, flagrantly kooky or potentially even sort-of-plausible alternative scenarios insisting that he didn't, and informed or uninformed speculation across the board is barreling toward us down the media interstate as we speak. And now we're done with the easy part.

To say that Williams had a powerful and quite possibly unquenchable need to win the public's love is no put-down, not least because his talent vastly increased the scope of an ambition few of us are immune to. Anybody who's ever worked at being known as the funniest guy around the office has been through a micro version of his career. That means, at the very least, that we're now a whole lot less likely to see a manic desire to be the funniest guy around the office as an inconsequential or entirely untroubling appetite.

I wasn't much of a fan of most of Williams's career, which makes things awkward. Or would, if not for my initial "Wow"—that is, if I hadn't started out, just like everybody else, being knocked for a loop by his mind's fecundity, the unstoppable machine-gun gleefulness of his free-associating improvisations, and all the other variations on run-amok creative energy that I, just like almost everybody else, first encountered on Mork And Mindy in the late 1970s. His relentless off-the-cuff spritzing converted that otherwise totally undistinguished My Favorite Martian knock-off into a must-see sitcom for people who normally didn't even like good ones; it was such a spontaneously combusting one-man show that, as legend has it, the writers used to leave whole pages of script blank except for "Mork does his thing." But if that was their idea of complaining about their lucrative irrelevance, it pales in poignancy compared to Williams's co-star, Pam Dawber, reportedly grumbling that nobody ever gave her any credit for M & M's success. Mindy, we hardly knew ye.

Advertisement

One reason the recovering-English-major likes of me were captivated early on was that Williams's frame of reference was omnivorous enough to keep him tossing in recondite allusions alongside crowd-friendly ones. It got obvious soon enough that those Easter eggs for Tennessee Williams or Hamlet fans didn't "mean" anything in terms of isolating this human dynamo's scheme of values; in practice, they were just more grist for a mill that turned everything under the sun into frenzied showbiz Esperanto and often substituted freewheeling unpredictability for wit. Yet recognizing that every form of specialized gobbledygook under the sun—literature, History 101, Bible class, sports, you name it—is or can be showbiz Esperanto is one of the central artistic perceptions (and bones of contention) of our time, and Williams's dramatization of it remains his best claim to bona-fide cultural consequence. What counted wasn't what he did so much as the fact that he did it for an audience of millions.

Even so, as far as most people today are concerned, his disruptive TV stardom in a piece of disposable Me Decade shlock is a mere prologue to a big-screen career that lasted over 30 years, earned him three Best Actor nominations as well as a Best Supporting Actor Oscar (for Good Will Hunting), and included its fair share of hits. While those stats make it counter-intuitive and then some to say Williams's Hollywood career was ultimately a failure, that's unquestionably what it was—by every criterion except raw numbers, a yardstick that sometimes mattered to him a lot and that he nonetheless had too much helpless acuity to trust as a be-all and end-all. Even when he had good parts, they never added up to a whole—and a version of Robin Williams that somehow incorporated everything under the 20th-century sun was his defining passion, after all.

Though he stayed a marquee name a lot longer than Richard Pryor—and made a bunch more moolah, too—the problem both men shared was that the industry's formulas kept their unruly originality hogtied. The closest Williams came to an ideal "Robin Williams" role on film was as fast-talking DJ Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam, which snared him his first Best Actor nod. Yet the movie would have been miles better if director Barry Levinson had tossed caution to the winds, opted not to play by the safety-first rules of his idea of box-office appeal, and let his star go all the way into a cuckoo and motormouthed spontaneous talking-head version of Apocalypse Now. From a certain perspective, the movie's real obscenity is that it isn't obscene.

Foiled in his ambition to incorporate everything under the sun—not the most realizable of dreams in any case, of course—Williams turned the separate facets of his gifts (and, more dubiously, neediness) excessive instead. In his manically cutesy mode, he'd have had schizophrenics fighting coke freaks to get to the exits first. When he opted to warm our hearts, he turned up the burners until you hoped somebody would call the fire department. After Patch Adams did that phase in, he tried to reinvent himself as an edgy indie-flick villain by way of advertising that a) he didn't need to be loved—yeah, right—and b) wasn't only in it for the money, ending up overreaching in that guise as well. Paradoxically or not, he was often most effective when used as a relatively reserved dramatic actor—in Penny Marshall's Awakenings, for instance, along with the more celebrated likes of Good Will Hunting or Dead Poets Society. But as good as he was, there was little that was uniquely Williams-esque in those performances. Other good actors could have played them just as capably, and they didn't have much to do with why he'd gotten famous in the first place.

Advertisement

For the record, I once wrote a very unkind appraisal of his career for a well-known magazine (not this one). I called him the most talented performer I'd ever disliked, and then things got kind of ornery. I bring it up not for a mea culpa's sake, because I don't think I was wrong; I'm just sadder about that now than I was at the time. It's worth bringing up only because, whatever else I thought of him, I'm in a position to tell you Robin Williams really knew how to make a gesture.

Not too long after the piece came out, I did a reading at an L.A. bookstore from a novel I'd recently published—one that (oh, the irony) did its minor-league best to incorporate everything under the 20th-century sun, from Gilligan's Island to Richard Nixon. The store's manager took me aback by telling me that Williams had popped by earlier to enthusiastically request an autographed copy, and also to send his regrets that he couldn't attend in person. Just my luck that it was the same night as a little thing called the Golden Globes.

As gestures go, it was amusing, it was generous—and it was also ever so slightly wicked, which was the part I most enjoyed. Besides making me feel like the world's biggest churl, it was a reminder that I was on his turf tonight—a performer to be judged and quite possibly found wanting. I have no idea whether Williams ever had the remotest intention of attending, but I'm sorry he didn't; turnabout is fair play. And I regret—man, do I ever, especially today—that I wasn't able to think up an amusing, equally generous, and slightly wicked inscription for him. But I wasn't.

Since 1957, GQ has inspired men to look sharper and live smarter with its unparalleled coverage of style, culture, and beyond. From award-winning writing and photography to binge-ready videos to electric live events, GQ meets millions of modern men where they live, creating the moments that create conversations.